BT Broadband and Panther

I'm getting my first PC, and it's going to be a Mac. On its way is an 12" iBook with 768mb ram, a 60GB hard drive and Airport extreme built in. In the past I've always used PCs at work.

In my house we run BT Broadband through a Voyager 200 modem. I know there are compatibility issues with this and Mac OS 10.3 Panther, but BT's support staff just tell me to buy a different modem.

What I want to do is connect Airport Express to my BT ADSL modem and connect to broadband that way from my iBook.

Has anyone had experience of this before, or is there anyone who might know if this will work/be relatively simple to set up? I've heard that I might only be able to use the Cat 5 Ethernet port on the BT modem to hook up to my iBook with no problems, but obviously this wouldn't be wireless.

I've performed a search on these forums but couldn't find anything answering this.

If I an understanding this right. You don't have a wireless network set up. In order to use the Airport Extreme built in card. You need to create a wireless network. You will only be able to connect up to your network is using the cat5 ethernet card as suggested. You will need to to buy either a wireless router or access point to create the wireless network. If you obtain one of the above items and create a wireless network. You should be able to access via the Airport extreme card once it is set up.

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass, It's about learning to dance in the rain!

I just did another search and I did find some info on BT Broadband (this is in the UK). They don't support OS 10.3, but you can get round this. You can use an ethernet cable, or you can fiddle it and use a USB cable.

I suppose I just wanted to get an idea of how to actually do this.

Anyway, from some other posts, I now see that it would probably be much easier to, as you suggest, get a wireless broadband router that is compatible with 10.3, rather than getting the Airport Express unit. This would probably work out cheaper too.

If anyone has any suggestions that would be great, otherwise I'm off to scour the web again.

PS: These seem like great forums, thanks for your reply, and thanks for any other help anyone else can give me.